Sometimes I dabble in marketing. We all do, to a large extent, in this day and age. We promote ourselves, our projects, our own version of how the world works. It’s called social media.

Let’s just hope it doesn’t end with social media. A few years back, I helped a guy start a social media campaign for his business. He now has over 16,000 Instagram followers, but what that actually translates to in business contacts is hard to measure. As far as we can tell, it’s translated to zero business revenue, and old-fashioned word of mouth and Google searches for websites have remained his most effective promotional tools. But who knows — that could change with just one client. That’s the challenge of marketing. Particularly when you’re a small business, the data can change dramatically with one click. And who can measure the success or failure of prolonged exposure in this multiconnected world? It is often true that when someone tells their friends they should really hire this particular person, they pull up something like Instagram to prove it.

Personal brand, outside of social media, is something that’s covered in our Perspectives, as Max Lobanov and Ian Hill write about marketing yourself and your localization team interpersonally and within a larger organization.

More in line with traditional marketing, we have four focus pieces devoted to global marketing and what the localization industry should know about it — video and other digital marketing for different regions; marketing in India; and how global brands manage their websites.

Unrelated to marketing but related to current global events, we have a highly personal piece by Emily deTar Gilmartin on refugees in Greece, and on a multilingual community in Athens that has taken many of them in. And there is more as well — we hope you enjoy all of it.